Abstract
Building on the concepts of discursive places and relational site-specificity, this chapter analyzes augmented reality (AR) public art and heritage projects that recover lost or repressed narratives and reembed them in material space. Accordingly, these projects enable an expanded sense of place that demonstrates their potential to reframe places as inclusive sites, which emerge from the combination of multiple histories.
Although AR has been used as a surveillance technology in platforms like Pokémon Go, this chapter reconceptualizes AR as a relational technology by recognizing that its output emerges through integrating digital content within material environments. Accordingly, I argue that AR does not simply “augment” reality; rather, AR can be used to (re)program immediate landscapes by facilitating different relationships between virtual content and actual space, which can diversify our experiences of places and cultural narratives.
I demonstrate this by analyzing projects like Border Memorial (2012/2017) and Ward One (2019), which seek to reimagine landscapes in light of the histories of racialized communities. These participatory engagements emphasize how digital technologies produce embodied, multisensorial experiences and a mixed sense of reality. Accordingly, they reimagine sites as discursive and relational places, thus exposing the social constructions embedded in them.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The concept of “abstract space” here is in correlation to Henri Lefebvre’s idea (1991). According to Lefebvre, the abstract space is intentionally constructed to distract visitors’ attention from the power dynamics that are embedded and have established cultural spaces.
- 3.
My use of the term “remediation” is borrowed from Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), who imagine every application of new media as a remediation of an older cultural practice.
- 4.
This collaboration is detailed on the app’s website, http://calliope.cse.sc.edu/wardone/ (retrieved on April 4, 2021).
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Efrat, L. (2022). Re: Place: Participatory and Discursive Place Making in Augmented Reality (AR) Public Art. In: Rausch, C., Benschop, R., Sitzia, E., van Saaze, V. (eds) Participatory Practices in Art and Cultural Heritage. Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05694-9_8
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